Delete
( All My Friends Are Gone, But Not Forgotten )
This is a soundtrack for a movie in my head.
It’s a response to war.
It’s a response to those lost at sea seeking sanctuary.
It’s a response to the displaced and persecuted.
It has its roots in the response to the inhumanity of people to each other.
This is a requiem for the silent.
Sometimes things just sit on your hard drive for a long time and then, when the time is right, they finally see the light of day.
Today is that day for this track Delete ( All My Friends Are Gone But Not Forgotten )
Today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day (2025 ), I was listening to the holocaust coverage as I usually do. An elderly lady, who had witnessed the horrors of Auschwitz first hand, was giving testament with honesty and quiet grace – a lesson to us all.
We must never forget, she pleads.
Yet we have and we do.
Since the liberation of the death camps 80 years ago there have been countless wars, forced removals, imprisonments, torture, mass migration, starvation, destruction of homes and the environment. Delete was originally written in response to the atrocities of the Bucha massacre in Ukraine in 2022 but it’s overall soundscape is one of universality. – A requiem for the silent.
We watch it all unfurl before our eyes but, shortly, we consign things to yesterdays news and just delete it from our hard drives and memories.
Usually I explain the ideas behind creating a sound piece but here I shall just acknowledge the field recordings that I used were by Felix Blume and freekit, both on the Freesound community and also sections, edited and processed, of the Angus Dei by Animuccia by the Tudor Consort on Free Music Archive under the Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0
Image of barbed wire by wal_172619 on Pixabay, edited by Museleon and used under the free use licence.
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